The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool

In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew. But if you think you know Marshall McLuhan, or what he stood for – think again.

Where in the waste is the wisdom?" – James Joyce

In 1971, Marshall McLuhan announced a new product.

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With chemist Ross Hall, his nephew, McLuhan patented a formula for the removal of urine odor from underpants. The unique advantage of McLuhan's formula, for which he registered the trademark Prohtex, was that it removed the urine odor without masking other, more interesting smells – that of perspiration, for instance. In the aural and tactile environment of preliterate man, McLuhan explained, BO had been a valuable means of communication. When electronic technology turned the world into a global village, tribal odors would make a comeback, too.

This prediction has yet to come true, but if body odor has not yet made a comeback, its prophet surely has. Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 and died in 1980. By the time of his death, he had been dismissed by respectable academicians, and he was known in the popular press as an eccentric intellectual whose day in the media spotlight had come and gone. By 1980, the transformation of human life catalyzed by television was taken for granted, and it no longer seemed interesting to ask where the electronic media were taking us. But in recent years, the explosion of new media – particularly the Web – has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again.

Conservative Christian anarchist

McLuhan's slogans "The medium is the message" and "The global village" are recited like mantras in every digital atelier in the world, despite the fact that hardly anyone who quotes McLuhan reads his books. Some of them McLuhan hardly wrote in the first place, trusting assistants and collaborators to cobble them together out of recordings and notes. As his biographer Philip Marchand explains, with wry sympathy, "writing books was not McLuhan's forte."

Neither was McLuhan very influential as a scholar or teacher. From the beginning of his career, the Canadian professor with a doctorate from Cambridge stood outside the academic mainstream for which he had little patience.

The natural incompatibility of originality and academia was probably especially difficult to overcome for McLuhan, who had received his early education in North American public schools, which, then as now, offered few advantages to their most talented students. By the time he arrived at Cambridge, McLuhan had acquired what is perhaps the defining trait of autodidacts – a kernel of personal crankiness and a resistance to established authority.

In his role as social, political, and economic analyst, McLuhan was a clown. His speeches and public pronouncements helped give rise to a generation of affluent futurists and business consultants skilled at telling executives what they liked to hear, but McLuhan's own predictions and business ideas were often hilariously ill-conceived. If his urine-odor remover failed to stimulate the instincts of business executives, perhaps McLuhan could talk Tom Wolfe into collaborating on a Broadway production of a play in which the media appeared on stage as characters. This aborted script followed two other McLuhan attempts at musicals, including one in which Russian Elvis fans were given a shot at governing America.

Even in areas where McLuhan was expected to be more dependable – say, pop culture – his pronouncements were often incredible. In 1968, for instance, McLuhan attempted to explain to readers of Playboy why the miniskirt was not sexy.

With McLuhan, the accuracy of his commentary was beside the point. "What is truth?" asked McLuhan in 1974, and he answered with a quote he attributed to Agatha Christie's iconoclastic investigator Hercule Poirot: "Eet ees whatever upsets zee applecart."

"You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet, or you would have no problems in understanding my procedure," McLuhan wrote to one detractor with whom he was especially irritated. "I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force, and pressures. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer."

McLuhan's strange scholarship and unprofitable business advice set him apart from such popular lecturers as Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, and even John Naisbitt, with whom he collaborated. McLuhan was stunningly oblivious to the question of how business executives would implement his suggestions and what results would be achieved. His presentations wandered far from their announced topics, and his audiences often ended up as baffled as his readers.

Also, McLuhan was never a cheerleader for the technological elite. "There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends," he wrote in a 1974 missive to the The Toronto Star. In this letter, McLuhan warned that electronic civilization was creating conditions in which human life would be treated as an expendable fungus, and he passionately protested against it.

In his personal habits, McLuhan was entirely literary.

He read ceaselessly. He was not in favor of television but enjoyed the cleverness of it. At the movies, he often fell asleep. McLuhan was a political conservative and a convert to Catholicism, and his pronouncements on current events always had an element of loony dispassion and professorial absent-mindedness.

At heart, McLuhan was not a futurist at all but a critic and an academic rebel in the tradition of Henry Adams, another conservative Christian mystic who preferred analyzing large-scale trends to compiling sober catalogs of unenlightening facts.

On the other hand, McLuhan was not a Luddite. "Value judgments create smog in our culture and distract attention from processes," he wrote to another detractor. In place of moralistic hand-wringing, McLuhan urged his listeners to take a stance of awareness and responsibility. "There is a deep-seated repugnance in the human breast against understanding the processes in which we are involved," he complained. "Such understanding involves far too much responsibility for our actions."

Faith in Christ

Marshall McLuhan was a skeptic, a joker, and an erudite maniac. He read too deeply from Finnegans Wake, had too great a fondness for puns, and never allowed his fun to be ruined by the adoption of a coherent point of view. He was dismayed by any attempt to pin him down to a consistent analysis and dismissive of criticism that his plans were impractical or absurd. His characteristic comment during one academic debate has taken on a mythic life of its own. In response to a renowned American sociologist, McLuhan countered: "You don't like those ideas? I got others."

In a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with whom he had a long friendship, McLuhan argued that in the modern electronic environment, it is inadvisable to be coherent. "Any moment of arrest or stasis permits the public to shoot you down." McLuhan preferred to make his rebuttals in the form of a quip. As he explained to Trudeau: "I have yet to find a situation in which there is not great help in the phrase: 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' It is literally disarming, pulling the ground out from under every situation! It can be said with a certain amount of poignancy and mock deliberation."

McLuhan's idea that media are extensions of man was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan's mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God.

But McLuhan did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later decided that the electronic unification of humanity was only a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was "a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very great electric engineer."

Though he enjoyed observing the battles of the day as they were played out in the media, McLuhan was deeply attached to the church and suspicious enough of worldly goings-on to be immune to large-scale politics or reformation movements. He put his faith in Christ. When challenged by a British journalist about the deleterious effects of electronic culture, McLuhan responded that he had "no doubt at all that Christus vincit. That is why a Christian cannot but be amused at the antics of worldlings to 'put us on.'" The true Christian strategy, McLuhan believed, was "pragmatic and tentative."

Pragmatic and tentative hardly seem the right adjectives for one of our era's greatest provocateurs. But in light of his Catholicism, McLuhan's pragmatism makes sense. Mystics are attuned to the voice of the Holy Spirit coming in directly, and they are the great demolishers of doctrine. Pragmatic does not mean practical, but nonsystematic. Tentative does not mean weak, but provisional and willing to change course under the influence of new revelations.

Fear of the global village

McLuhan did not want to live in the global village. The prospect frightened him. Print culture had produced rational man, in whom vision was the dominant sense. Print man lived in a world that was secular rather than sacred, specialized rather than holistic.

But when information travels at electronic speeds, the linear clarity of the print age is replaced by a feeling of "all-at-onceness." Everything everywhere happens simultaneously. There is no clear order or sequence. This sudden collapse of space into a single unified field "dethrones the visual sense." This is what the global village means: we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums. For McLuhan, this future held a profound risk of mass terror and sudden panic.

The current idea of a global village as a place of universal harmony and industrious basket-weaving is a tourist's fantasy. McLuhan gave in to the intoxication of this hope for a few years in the early '60s, and it is evident throughout Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, his most optimistic work. In that book, McLuhan sings of the furthest reaches of electronic culture, when computer technology has replaced language with instant nonverbal communication. He compares this mystical unification of humanity to the Christian Pentecost. But McLuhan soon realized that before the Pentecost comes suffering and crucifixion, and while we are all waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend, Jerusalem is likely to be scary as hell.

The medium is a message … from Satan

When McLuhan said that the medium is the message, he was trying to raise an alarm. Big debates over the content of media – such as the controversies over sex and violence on television – miss the point entirely, he argued, because the transformation of human life is carried on by the form of the medium rather than any specific program transmitted by it. Protesting the programs carried by the media is futile because the owners of the media are always happy to give the public exactly what it wants. Standing in opposition to any sort of programming is not only a lonely and isolating posture, it also serves to advance the popularity of the programming protested.

Of course the content of a medium is important, but according to McLuhan the content is not the programming. (This sort of content, McLuhan wrote, "is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.") The real content of any medium is the user of the medium. We are the content of our media. Each medium delivers a new form of human being, whose qualities are suited to it.

"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values," wrote McLuhan, pointing out that electronic culture is no more corrupt in this sense than is print culture, or the preliterate culture of poetry, song, and myth. Language is a type of technology, too, McLuhan noted, anticipating and rejecting the moralism of modern-day Luddites.

From Samuel Butler's Erewhon, McLuhan got the idea that human beings are the sexual organs of the technological world. The user of any medium is its content, just as the content of genetic code is the individual member of the species that manifests and transmits it. When he used his most oracular tone, McLuhan's description of man's servitude to media was chilling.

"Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive…. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier."

McLuhan believed that the message of electronic media brought dangerous news for humanity: it brought news of the end of humanity as it has known itself in the 3,000 years since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. The literate-mechanical interlude between two great organic periods of culture is coming to an end as we watch and as we listen.

Moralistic resistance is futile, according to McLuhan, and serves only to make things worse. "On a moving highway, the vehicle that backs up is accelerating in relation to the highway situation," he wrote. "Such would be the ironical status of the cultural reactionary. When the trend is one way, his resistance insures a greater speed of change."

And yet McLuhan's answer to the neo-Luddites presumed that in fact there is something faster than the speed of electronic media: thinking. McLuhan urged us to think ahead. "Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." By giving up our resistance and allowing our minds to travel ahead of the coming changes, McLuhan allowed some chance that we will rescue something of our humanity or invent something better to replace it.

Because McLuhan is a trickster and a holy fool, any attempt by "regularity chauvinists," as the hypermedia guru Ted Nelson calls them, to impose strict discipline on his terminology will come to no good.

Usually McLuhan used hot to describe media that are rich in information and require little participation on the part of the user. Radio is hot because the sound of the human voice is magnified and human speech is standardized and clarified, reducing the amount of interpretation required to understand it. The recipient of the radio broadcast receives a rich information stream that passes through the ears to the brain.

In contrast, the television watcher is highly involved, because the low-resolution TV monitor, with its mosaic screen, requires greater mental participation. TV encourages ironic commentary from viewers, who are constantly being challenged to pull the picture together in their mind's eye. Television produced the remote control and channel surfing, which make this sort of participation obvious. Few listeners use remote controls with radios, and channel surfing on the radio is associated only with the most low-fi radio environment – the automobile.

Hot media deliver more information because they have taken a single sense, such as sight, and magnified and abstracted it to a state of optimum efficiency. Printed books are hotter than illuminated manuscripts because printed books are uniform and repeatable; once a person has mastered the code and become an experienced reader, there is nothing in the book to distract from the direct and rapid transfer of data. In an illuminated manuscript, the text is presented in unique visual style which the reader must attentively contemplate.

McLuhan saw the world cooling down after a hot interval. The twist was cooler than the Charleston. Cool jazz replaced bebop. TV was cooler than radio, which was cooler than print, but much hotter than the songs and dances of tribal culture.

McLuhan's vocabulary is counterintuitive. A cool medium creates more participation, but more involvement also means more passivity. Complaints that today's young people have a short attention span are just acknowledgments of the increase in participation associated with a general cooling down of the media.

A conversation is very cool. A lecture is much hotter. In a conversation there are many repetitions, gaps, and delays, which the participants must filter, fill in, and interpret. A lecture has concentrated all the information in a steady flow, which can be absorbed with less involvement.

In a cool medium, repetition is desirable. The fact that much of the money from television dramas and comedies is earned from syndicated reruns, or that Broadway could support a successful play that exactly mimicked episodes from The Brady Bunch, would have amused and satisfied McLuhan. In a cool culture, media are mythic in form, and like myths, television programs are enhanced through repetition.

In our cool electronic culture, every message is repeated over and over, like spam in your e-mail box. "One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to 'dig' it," wrote McLuhan, who was fond of repeating a slogan he claimed to have gotten from IBM: "Information overload = pattern recognition."

In academic language, this is metonymy: the part can stand in for the whole. McLuhan believed that metonymy, which can be represented graphically as a fractal design, or as a spiral, or as a web of concentric circles, is the natural mode of electronic communication. Attempting to force linear, logical, coherent plots and arguments into electronic dramas or discussions creates unintentional comedy.

McLuhan saw the preindustrial parts of the globe racing toward mechanization, while we in the First World sailed blithely back into the tribal unconscious. In one of his more technocratic visions, McLuhan imagined a central media-planning committee that could adjust the ratio of electronic and nonelectronic media, thus preventing catastrophe. At most other times, he saw humankind blundering toward a dismal future it didn't know how to control.

Harmony or panic? Cool participation or hot violence? McLuhan permitted himself both of these prophecies. "Among the people of the world," he wrote in 1964, "strange new vortices of power will appear unexpectedly."

But, like, what was he like?

McLuhan was a professor, and he smoked a pipe. Pipes were cool and involving – participatory – while cigarettes were abstract, uniform, and hot. The fact that cigarettes are useful as currency but pipe tobacco is not would have provided plenty of material for a McLuhan monolog, which would have continued as long as his listeners were willing to give him their ears.

McLuhan loved to talk. His natural medium was speech. He slept fitful hours, and when he awakened with something on his mind – at any hour – he would call a friend and start talking. Peter Drucker, who knew McLuhan in the 1940s when Drucker was teaching at Bennington College, remembers opening the door one rainy morning to find McLuhan standing soaked on his doorstep, ready for a chat. Hugh Kenner, a fellow Canadian who was pushed into a PhD program at Yale University by McLuhan and went on to become a brilliant scholar and essayist, knew McLuhan well in the '50s, and describes him as a fanatical talker who preferred to spend no more than 20 minutes at any movie – just long enough to fuel an evening-long lecture.

McLuhan knew how to keep a straight face. If he often laughed at his own jokes, it may have been as much to signal baffled listeners that a joke had occurred as to express spontaneous mirth – for when he wanted to "put on" his audience, he could do so without the trace of a smile.

Facts never bothered McLuhan, nor would he concede a point in argument. When caught using an example that could be proven incorrect and confronted by a student or colleague rude enough to heave this inconvenient detail into the works, McLuhan would press ahead, speak up louder, interrupt, and race off on a new tangent. If an opponent let slip a stray mispronunciation, McLuhan would be off on that. John Wain, a British poet and a friend of McLuhan's, described his method as "brain-teeming criticism." Objections fell into the superdense texture of his conversation like trivial meteoric debris into the substance of a star; if they mattered at all, it was only as additional fuel.

Not that he had bad manners, exactly. In social exchanges he was gentlemanly, but when the fire got burning, he refused to dampen it. Many of his intellectual friends were close to him for a number of years and then seemed to grow exhausted by the friendship. He had few fellow travelers over the long run.

Drucker describes McLuhan as a monomaniac, but this is unfair to a man who absorbed thousands of books and was interested in anything and everything. He was a polymaniac, and it was his mania that both buoyed him up and destroyed him.

I've never read McLuhan, but …

Why don't we read Marshall McLuhan today? Although trained as a highly specialized bookman and supported by an academic sinecure, McLuhan did little to guarantee his influence as a writer and scholar. From his earliest career, he ignored his peers. He wrote few books, and the ones he did write grew progressively more difficult. He did not train many graduate students who might have sustained his legacy. McLuhan treated his teaching responsibilities casually, his publishing commitments with utter disregard.

In a fascinatingly self-destructive manner, McLuhan signed his name to material he never wrote. Even after death, this practice continues. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, "co-written" with Bruce Powers, was published in 1989 by the Oxford University Press, nine years after McLuhan's death. There are few clues in the introduction as to how this feat of post-mortem authorship was accomplished, but it appears that it was inspired by tapes of the authors talking with each other and sharing incomplete attempts at creating a manuscript. During his life, McLuhan published an unsuccessful newsletter, wrote confusing letters to business executives, made absurd pronouncements on television, and took little care to protect his dignity or enhance his reputation.

And yet we all know his name and his slogans. McLuhan's message has insinuated itself into the oral culture of the electronic age, and no amount of academic criticism or easy ridicule can remove it from circulation. McLuhan's slogans circulate because they are snappy but also because they have never been understood. Were they neatly wrapped up in a systematic sociology of media, they would be absorbed, superseded, and forgotten. His slogans are like lines of poems, or phrases from songs – capable of carrying powerful and ambiguous messages into new environments.

To some who venture from the slogans to the books, McLuhan will seem outdated, especially in his hope for a human engagement with media that goes beyond technological idiocy and numb submission. McLuhan's jokes and satirical put-ons were challenges to understand where our media were leading us, and there is no clear evidence that we have been able to respond to his challenge. It is comforting to think McLuhan is outdated, because it alleviates our shame at not living up to his demands. His pleas for understanding and his warnings of doom are like the quaint aphoristical exhortations and eschatological prophecies of the early church.

In the end, McLuhan's success stems from this failure, which was a form of martyrdom. He spread himself across too many media, he scattered his pearls before swine ("perils before our swains," as it says in Finnegans Wake), and he chopped up his promising scholarly career into hundreds of thousands of jokes, quips, bad puns, inane television commentaries, and letters to the editor. Respectable folk turned up their noses at his odor of sanctity, and the sage's reputation slowly died. But today McLuhan lives on, even composing books after his death, as electronic culture's immortal saint.

1911

Born July 21 in Edmonton, Alberta.

1930

Published first article, "Macaulay – What a Man!" in the student newspaper at the University of Manitoba.

1937

Converted to Catholicism.

1951

Published first book, The Mechanical Bride.

1953

Founded the magazine Explorations to publish work on the subjects of language and media.

1955

Formed the company Idea Consultants to offer creative business advice to executives.

1962

Published The Gutenberg Galaxy.

1964

Published Understanding Media.

1966

Quoted in The New York Times: "I predict a return of hot sauces to American cuisine. With color TV, the entire sensory life will take on a whole new set of dimensions."

1967

Published The Medium Is the Massage.

1967

Had brain tumor removed.

1967

Featured on the cover of Newsweek.

1968

Founded The Dew-Line newsletter to popularize his ideas with executives.

1970

Satirized in a cartoon in The New Yorker: "Ashley, are you sure it's not too soon to go around parties saying, 'What ever happened to Marshall McLuhan?'"

1972

Co-authored book, Take Today, which sold only 4,000 copies.

1977

Appeared in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall.

1980

Died

1989

Publication of The Global Village, written with Bruce Powers.

1995

First e-mail interview, in Wired.

The Medium is the Massage

The Medium Is the Massage, a slim volume published in 1967, was McLuhan's only best-seller. He wrote the title, Jerome Agel collected the McLuhanisms, and Quentin Fiore created the design, combining word and image in a way that transformed our notions of what a book "should" be.

Wired's intro pages are direct descendants of The Medium Is the Massage; in fact, the introduction to Wired's premiere issue quotes the book's opening paragraph.

The Medium Is the Massage was reissued in 1989 and has since gone out of print. But for the full massage, find a beat-up copy of the original, pretend it's 1967, and prepare to have your mind blown.